“Not now, Alistair,” she had said. “I’m not in the mood.”
She was never in the mood anymore. We hadn’t made love in weeks. And she was spending all of her time at the lake house with the girls—she never brought them to the city anymore. She was just out there, every night, alone.
I thumbed through the rest of the photographs on my desk. Pictures of Grace at the lake house with the girls; pictures of Grace and the girls in town; pictures of Grace and the girls at Grace’s parents’ house. And then Grace, in a sleazy diner in a dark booth with him.
“Do you have any pictures of . . .” I trailed off, not knowing how to ask for pictures of my wife in bed with another man. “Where are the rest of the pictures?” I asked instead.
“I only caught them together once,” Mr. Lynch said. “They were at the diner for an hour. They left separately. Grace went home alone. He never came to the house, at least not during the time that I was tailing her.”
At least Grace had the decency to keep her transgressions out of our home, away from our girls. Well, at least as far as we knew.
Mr. Lynch set a thin folder in front of me. “I pulled Grace’s phone records,” he said. “This is a log of her calls to him.”
I took out the piece of paper and skimmed the entries. The first call was from Grace to Peter’s private cell phone a couple of weeks ago. After that, they traded calls several times a week. Some of the calls were just a few minutes long; some were as long as an hour. Most of the calls were made in the evening. I pictured Grace sitting on our bed at night, a glass of white wine on the nightstand next to her. Her hair wet from the shower, her bare, freshly shaved legs on the sheets. Her phone cradled to her ear as she spoke in low, sultry whispers to him, so as not to wake our girls, who were fast asleep down the hall.
“After their meeting at the diner, nothing,” Mr. Lynch said. “The calls stopped.”
I picked up the pictures, flipped to the next one in the deck. Grace was visibly upset in this one. She was crying.
“What do we know about him?” I asked. “This Peter Hindsberg?”
“He’s an insurance fraud investigator at Hartco Insurance,” Mr. Lynch said. “He was the one assigned to that workers’ comp claim one of your landscapers filed a few months back at the lake house. Looks like he came out to the house to meet with Grace. Only, they didn’t cut ties when the claim was settled.
“I did some digging, and it turns out Grace and Peter went to high school together. He was a couple years younger than her but they knew each other.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said. “Grace has never mentioned him.”
Mr. Lynch shrugged. “You run into an old acquaintance you knew back when you were kids, you strike up a conversation. There’s a flicker of attraction. One thing leads to another. It’s more common than you might think. But the good news is, whatever was going on between them appears to be over. I haven’t seen any signs of contact between Grace and Peter since they met at the diner. Turns out, Peter’s also married. His wife just had their first baby. I’m guessing his conscience caught up with him.”
“You’re sure it’s over?” I asked.
“Looks that way,” Mr. Lynch said. “But I can keep an eye on things, if you want, Mr. Calloway.”
“No,” I said. “No, I’ll handle it. Thanks, Sean.”
I reached for my intercom and held down the button to buzz Rosie. She appeared at my door a second later.
“Yes, Mr. Calloway?” she asked.
“Take care of Sean here, will you?” I asked.
“Right away,” Rosie said.
I stood to shake Mr. Lynch’s hand. When they were both gone, I sank back into the seat behind my desk. I looked at the photographs and rubbed my chin.
Grace. What to do about Grace? I wanted to hurt her the way she had hurt me. And I wanted her to find out that I knew in the same way I had found out about her affair. It would be cold. Impersonal.
I tore out a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad on my desk. In block capital letters I wrote, I KNOW. I folded it and put it into an envelope. Then I picked up the stack of photographs. I contemplated just putting the one from the diner in there. The picture of Grace and Peter Hindsberg holding hands. But then my eye caught on another photograph on my desk. It was a picture of my oldest daughter, Charlotte, playing in the backyard at Grace’s parents’ house. It wasn’t just me that Grace had betrayed. It was our family. I turned the picture of Charlotte over and on the back, I wrote, STOP. Then I slid the photographs into the envelope and sealed it. I imagined her getting the envelope with no return address in the mail in a few days. Opening it. The sickening trickle down her spine as she saw the photographs and the note and realized that I knew. I knew everything.
Thirty-Three
Charlie Calloway
2017
I could feel Dalton’s steady gaze on me in class, but I steadfastly ignored him, looking everywhere but in his direction.
I hadn’t spoken to Dalton since the incident outside the dining hall three days ago, but he had tried, on several occasions, to speak with me—notes in my mailbox (Charlie, I’m so sorry, can we talk?), a bouquet of roses delivered to my desk in homeroom. His favorite trick was trying to corner me after class in the hallway, so I had gotten in the habit of getting excused from class a few minutes early every day so that I could make a quick getaway.
Greyson was still around. He had gotten a hotel room in Falls Church and would come by campus in the evening to see me. I had told him everything—from what I knew about my father and Jake’s death and my mother’s disappearance, to what had happened with Dalton, and Greyson had insisted on staying, to make sure I was all right and to help me look into my mother’s case.
Greyson spent most of his day at the library in Falls Church doing research, so I was surprised when I returned to my room after my afternoon classes and found him there, sprawled out on Drew’s bed with some files.
“I found this today,” Greyson said, climbing off the bed and handing me a small stack of papers that had been stapled together. “It’s a copy of Jake’s autopsy report.”
“How’d you get that?” I asked, laying my bag on my desk and taking the report from him.
Greyson shrugged. “Public record.”
I skimmed the documents. The pathologist’s description of Jake’s body was difficult to read. Blanching and bloating of the epidermis . . . Water found in stomach . . . Aspirations of fluid in the air passages . . . Pink foam in mouth. The estimated time of death was listed as between eight p.m. and midnight on December 21, 1990. Under “Cause of Death,” he had listed: Pulmonary edema.
“Pulmonary edema?” I asked, looking up at Greyson.
“It means fluid in the lungs,” Greyson said. “Drowning.”
“So Margot was telling the truth,” I said.
“Looks like it,” Greyson said, pointing to a place on the next page. “And here, it states that there were no abrasions or bruising on Jake’s body consistent with a struggle—nothing to suggest that he was bound or forced into the water.”
“So, suicide,” I said.
“Yep,” Greyson said. “Couple that with the note my mom told us they found in Jake’s room and Jake’s death seems pretty cut-and-dry.”
My eyes scanned the report, searching for something, anything, that would point in another direction. “What about this? The tox screen results. Jake tested positive for alcohol, acetaminophen, and oxycodone,” I said.
Greyson nodded. “Relatively low levels according to my research, but yes, quite the illicit cocktail. According to the report, though, drowning was the official cause of death.”
“So Jake was drinking the night he died?” I asked.
“It appears so,” Greyson said.
“And taking drugs,” I said.
I blew out my breath and thought. Oxycodone and acetaminophen. Percocet? Students passed Percs around campus like candy. I’d never had a prescription, but even I had popped a
few pills at a party once when Sheila Andrews had brought her leftover stash from her wisdom teeth extraction. It was what most kids considered a safe high—much less dangerous than taking heroin or other illegal narcotics.
“Maybe there’s something else here,” I said. “Something that was overlooked.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was grasping at straws, looking for connections that didn’t exist. But there was something linking my mother’s disappearance and Jake and my father, and my gut told me it had to do with Jake’s death.
“There’s, uh, one other interesting thing that I came across today,” Greyson said. He scratched the back of his neck, like he was nervous to tell me.
“What?” I asked.
He went over to his bed and grabbed another piece of paper. When he handed it to me, I saw that it was a photocopy of an old newspaper clipping. It was an engagement notice. My father’s engagement notice. Only, it wasn’t to my mother. There was my father in the photograph, and next to him in the portrait was another face I recognized.
“My father was engaged to Margot?” I asked.
“Apparently,” Greyson said, shrugging. “I’m guessing he never mentioned that?”
“No,” I said. But then again, there’d been a lot he and my family had kept from me.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.
“I know, I know,” Greyson said, holding up his hands. “Into the closet I go.”
I smiled at him. “Thank you,” I said.
When Greyson was safely hidden in Drew’s closet, I opened my door.
It was Leo. He was holding a small box and some sort of playing board was tucked under his other arm.
I almost shut the door in his face, but he reached out and held it open before I could stop him.
“What do you want?” I asked.
I hadn’t spoken to Leo since the incident outside the dining hall, and I really didn’t care to ever speak to him again. His betrayal stung even more than Dalton’s.
“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “Let’s start there.”
I had never heard Leo apologize for anything before, and it sort of caught me off guard.
“I only put you in the game because I knew you were too good for any of the guys here, and you’d never go for them,” Leo said. “When you started to go for Dalton, I tried to warn you about him. I didn’t see things playing out this way, or I would have never done it in the first place.”
“I thought you had my back,” I said.
“Listen, Charlie, I would never let anyone hurt you,” Leo said. “The only reason I didn’t step in again was because Dalton convinced me he actually liked you and him being with you wasn’t about the game at all. He’s still really into you. He only brought up the game the other day because he was upset.”
“That’s great,” I said. “But I don’t really believe anything either of you have to say anymore.”
“Just hear him out,” Leo said. “Hear him out, and then you can decide if you want to believe him or not. I’m supposed to give you this first.”
He handed me a board.
I took it and unfolded it. It had a bunch of blank boxes on it.
“It’s a puzzle,” Leo said. “You’re supposed to put all the letters together and figure out what it says.”
“What letters?” I asked.
“Here,” Leo said, handing me the box. I opened it. There was a cupcake from the gourmet cupcake shop in Falls Church. On the top of the cupcake was a little tile with a letter on it: “Y.”
“Just one letter?” I asked.
“No, there’ll be other letters,” he said.
“I think I’ve had enough of your little games to last me a lifetime,” I said.
“Trust me,” Leo said. “You’ll like this game. Listen, I’ve got to get to practice, but we’ll talk later, okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
When he left, I set the playing board and the tile down on my desk.
“You’re not really doing this, are you?” Greyson asked. He had come out of the closet, and he had his arms crossed over his chest, looking all disappointed.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“That thing some girls do, where the guy is horrible and then makes some gesture, and the girl forgets how horrible the guy is, just in time for the guy to do something else horrible.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”
“Because this wasn’t some stupid fight, Charlie,” Greyson said. “This guy—he completely used you. And your cousin is an asshole for letting him.”
“I know,” I said, cutting him off. “I know, okay? I was there. A stupid cupcake isn’t going to give me amnesia.”
“Okay,” Greyson said.
There was another knock at the door.
“Jesus,” Greyson said.
“Can you just get in the closet?” I asked.
Greyson sighed and rolled his eyes but did as I said. It was Crosby at the door with another cupcake and another tile. Over the next half hour, half the soccer team came to the door with a boxed cupcake and tile, and I had solved the puzzle. It said, I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.
“Wow,” Greyson said, looking at the solved puzzle on my desk. “Preppy really goes all out.”
There was another knock on my door and I opened it reluctantly. Dalton was standing there. I would have shut the door in his face, but he looked all humbled and apologetic, so un-Dalton-like.
“Hi, Charlie,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“I’m with someone,” I said, opening the door enough that he could see that Greyson was there.
“Hi,” Dalton said, reaching out his hand to greet Greyson. “I don’t think we were properly introduced last time. I’m Dalton. It’s really good to meet you.”
Greyson just stood where he was, his arms crossed over his chest. “Yeah, I can’t really say the same,” he said. “Charlie’s told me all about you, and it wasn’t really a ringing endorsement, if you catch my drift.”
Dalton dropped his hand to his side, clearly caught off guard by Greyson’s frank comments.
“You have three seconds to get the hell out of here before I reconfigure your face with my fist,” Greyson said. “And you can take your smarmy apologies with you.”
“I didn’t come here to stir anything up,” Dalton said, raising his hands at his sides as if he were surrendering. “Whether you believe my apology to be genuine or not, it is. And really, it’s not up to you. This is between me and Charlie.”
Greyson stepped forward, putting himself between me and the doorway.
“Greyson, it’s okay,” I said.
I tugged on the back of his shirt but that did little to get his attention.
“Greyson,” I said again. “I can talk to him. It’s okay.”
“You don’t have to,” Greyson said. “You don’t owe him anything.”
“I know,” I said.
“Okay,” Greyson said. “But I’ll be right out here. Like literally right out here. And this door stays open.”
Dalton took a step back so Greyson could go out into the hallway. I motioned Dalton into my room and shut the door most of the way, leaving about an inch of open space between the door and the frame.
“Charlie, I’m sorry about what I said,” Dalton said, taking a step away from the door and lowering his voice so that Greyson couldn’t hear us. “Being with you was never about that stupid game for me—not for one moment. I was into you before Leo ever put your name on that board. It’s just taken me a long time to get up the nerve to do anything about it, because, well, you don’t exactly make things easy.”
He smiled and I bit my lip.
“I’m sorry about the way I treated you the other day,” Dalton said. “I didn’t mean any of the things I said. That wasn’t me.”
“So why did you say that, if you didn’t mean it?” I asked, crossing my arms.
“Because I was upset,” Dalton sa
id. “It’s obvious I like you. Everybody knows it. But you’re still so . . . guarded with me. And at first I just thought that was how you were—that maybe you had trouble opening up or something. But then I saw you in your room with another guy, and I just felt like—like an idiot. Like maybe the reason you were being distant wasn’t because you had trouble opening up, but because you didn’t like me as much as I liked you.”
“I did like you,” I said.
And I had been distant, cold even, at times. I knew that.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know—maybe it was stupid. But that’s how I felt. And I went from hurt to angry to that person who said those things. And I’m sorry.”
Part of me felt like I should apologize too, for treating him the way I had. But a larger part, the more stubborn part, felt that apologizing would mean that I was apologizing for what he had done—that the way I had treated him had caused him to treat me the way he had, and that wasn’t true. Was it?
“I didn’t come here expecting anything,” Dalton went on. “I just came over because I wanted you to know how sorry I am about what happened.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” I said.
He stood in front of me, his shoulders all slumped and his eyes all remorseful. He looked genuinely sorry. And I mean, this was Dalton. This was the guy who had put his arm around the back of my chair in the dining hall. The guy who had defended me against his friends. The guy who had held me as if I were fragile and might break when he kissed me. The guy who looked at me like—like no one had ever looked at me. Before the other night, he had always treated me with the utmost care and respect.
“Well, I’ll go now,” Dalton said. “Thank you for hearing me out.”
“Sure,” I said.
When he left, Greyson came back in and closed the door. “Glad that’s over,” he said.
All These Beautiful Strangers Page 32